Religion and Politics, the root of much evil in this world…

O-Man
7 min readOct 31, 2020

…especially when the ingredients Power, Greed and Intolerance are mixed into the “stew.”

I believe in the motto of “Live and Let Live.” In religion, I do not subscribe to or follow any particular one but try to live as a good and decent human being. I respect whatever or whoever people worship or believe in and kindly ask them to respect my standpoint of being “unaffiliated” in return. However, people who follow different religions have been at odds with each other throughout history, believing that their religion is the only true one and everyone else should accept it and join in, or else… How bonkers is that?

In politics, I believe that politicians must have differing opinions and view points, which get presented, debated and finally, by making compromises, get combined into laws, rules and regulations that are necessary to do the business of the people and make the decisions that are best for the entire population and the country.

Politicians and political parties have an unwritten contract with society to function for all the people and represent folks from all walks of life.

When Power, Greed and Intolerance enter the picture, things will start to go wrong.

Here in the USA, for more than a decade now, Republicans and the Republican Party have often clandestinely and out of the public eye, changed their view of the contract and slowly but surely have begun to erode and change the rules of the game in order to impose their view of the world on all of us.

One way they have been doing this is by installing young, ultra conservative judges on key courts, with lifetime appointments. This is now becoming apparent in some rulings made by courts that have a majority of these judges, ruling that guns can be openly carried at polling stations or that the vote count has to effectively stop at midnight on election night, never mind that not all votes have been counted because perhaps they have not reached the polling stations yet because the party in power has made voting more difficult, has slowed down the mail service in a pandemic when more people will want to vote by mail.

The last three judges that were confirmed to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court are ultra conservatives, at least one of them following an “Originalist” philosophy when interpreting our Constitution and Bill of Rights rather than treating them as living, breathing, ever changing guidelines that need to constantly be adjusted to fit the current times. She is also a religiously driven nutcase who refused to give straight answers to straight forward questions during her turbo installment hearings.

For years now, instead of working with the Democrats, Republicans have stalled, undermined and road-blocked most work for the country, the work we expect politicians to do for the people, they refuse to compromise on anything and have created an Us vs. Them situation.

This has become blatantly apparent over the past four years where they have sat idly by and watched a useless, dumb, intolerant, hateful, sexist, racist wanna be dictator and corrupt piece of garbage in the White House, supported by his family of greedy Grifters, hollow out the institutions of government that serve and support our country, spit into the face of decency, rules and traditions, only to amass more power for themselves.

They have enriched themselves shamelessly by taking money from lobbyists who are only interested in making more money for the companies they work for and then push through laws that make the life of the average person more difficult, perhaps because they lose insurance coverage or other protections.

These Republicans are now desperately trying to stay in power by trying to affect the outcome of the election in their favor. They have manipulated voting laws in individual states, like making it necessary for voters to have an ID. They have gerrymandered to suppress certain populations from having a voice with their vote by dividing electoral districts to keep certain populations from being able gain a majority. In Florida they are keeping convicted felons who have served their debt to society from receiving their voting rights back until they have paid all outstanding fines, something that is too much of a hurdle for most of them. These people are also overwhelmingly black or brown and traditionally lean towards the party of the Democrats when voting.

With the installation of the ultra conservative judges in key positions, the Republicans are hoping that even if they lose this election, they will be able to stay in power by going to court, throwing the election results into doubt for long enough to give a judge the time to declare them the winners after all, for some shady reason they will concoct.

Why?

Because Power, Greed and Intolerance have corrupted these Republicans and large parts of their party!

They have experienced power and want to keep it at all costs. They want to continue to enrich themselves through lucrative lobbyist presents in exchange for bad deals for our country and its people. They are intolerant towards people who have different view points of the world and of life and do not want to discuss these different views and make compromises which would benefit all of us.

These Republicans in the House and the Senate, lead by Trump, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham do not want to live in a diverse, colorful world. They would like to live in a world where the “White Man” rules, where the rich are served by the poor for as little money as possible to keep them poor. They are afraid of and can not understand the diversity of genders or sexual orientations, never mind just a general diversity of people from different societies with different cultures and traditions.

No, the Republicans want to live in a world that is clearly divided into black and white, male and female, conservative and ultra conservative, rich and poor, master and servant, etc., whilst eating buckets of caviar or perhaps buckets of fried chicken from Colonel Sanders and drinking mint juleps or fresh lemonade on the porch of their stately plantation home.

Instead of doing just that in the privacy of their own lives, they want to push their view of the world down our collective throats and make us live in their world, back to the 18th century where women had no rights and white men could be pigs without being held accountable, whether we like it or not.

They want to live in a world where it is fine to carry guns openly, but someone carrying a knife is a threat and needs to be shot dead when he moves towards you. They want a world where a dividing ball of cells in a women’s uterus needs to be protected from abortion at all costs. They do not want to allow a pregnant women to decide for herself whether or not to have an abortion because of the circumstances of her life. They shout about “the sanctity of life,” while at the same time not nurturing and supporting that life and its mother, once it is born. And speaking of sanctity of life, these Republicans often have no problems with the application of the death penalty. Very hypocritical!

The funny thing is, nobody keeps them from living their own lives that way. We have the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Quakers who have been living along side modern society for centuries while keeping their own traditions and faiths, for example.

A Republican, living in a modern, diverse society and world, does not have to be afraid of the rest of us. They have a choice to live their lives while keeping away from things they do not like or agree with. They do not have to have gay friends, they do not have to get an abortion when pregnant (perhaps Republican males should also be more concerned not to impregnate in the first place), they can enjoy their wealth any way they choose, they can collect their guns and carry them around their house…they can do whatever.

What they should not do is try to make us live our lives their way, it is not our thing!

I like to live in a world where I have many choices, a world with different colors, smells, sounds and tastes - a world with diversity. A world with different ideas that get debated and discussed and then perhaps compromised over or perhaps where it is agreed to disagree, without creating a chasm between people.

I like to live in a world following the credo of “All people are created equal and have equal rights, no matter what the color of their skin is, what gender they are, whom they love, how they love, whether or not or how they worship, whom they worship…you get the point.”

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O-Man

Born in what was then West Germany, at the beginning of the 60s, I came to the USA in 1979. I am married and have two kids. I believe in “live and let live.”